Application of E-Governance in Police Administration of Sylhet Metropolitan Police: Does It Bring Effectiveness and Efficiency?

Abstract

The term e-governance refers to the process of using information technology for automating both the internal operations of the government and its external interactions with citizens and other agencies. Computerization of internal operations reduces their cost and improves their proceeding time while at the same time allowing government processes to be more elaborate in order to increase their efficacy. Automation of interactions with citizens reduces the overhead for both the government and the citizens, thus creating value for the economy. The police department plays an imperative role in maintaining the law and order situation in any state. It is an area of high government-to-citizen interaction. The explosion of smarter devices and pervasive internet services has given many consumers new levels of access to information. These always-on, technology natives include a younger generation of tomorrow‘s active citizens, who have high expectations of their government agencies, such as on-demand services with native integration to social media and smart devices. The appetite for government information is now so great that social tools and open data applications, such as those enabled by the cloud, are often the only viable solution to provide these richer, and more personalized experiences, resulting in better served and more engaged citizens. While providing technology that better supports the citizen and workers is a significant step forward there remains the challenge of connecting disparate government agencies to improve collaboration. Succeeding in this is critical, as successful operations depend upon seamless collaboration between specialists to share both information and resources. This is especially true as some seek to engage with non-government or external organizations to reduce costs and improve agility. This requires robust, scalable technology such as the cloud to operate effectively, as without them the best intentions can be undermined by simple breakdowns in the collaboration and communication. Bangladesh is a least-developing country. As a welfare state within a democratic framework, it has to perform many social welfare activities. In this regard, a responsive police administration is very important to implement such social development activities. But in Bangladesh, there is no dynamic and fully responsive police administrative culture. A major cause of these problems is lack of connection among the administrative organs of the government. It can easily solve the problem by establishing connected government.